Jared Olar: I'm skeptical of Bible skepticism

Friday

Apr 22, 2011 at 12:01 AMApr 22, 2011 at 10:16 PM

It never fails. Whenever Easter and Passover roll around, you can expect to find television programs, magazine articles and newspaper stories that question or deny central beliefs of Christianity and Judaism.

Jared Olar

It never fails. Whenever Easter and Passover roll around, you can expect to find television programs, magazine articles and newspaper stories that question or deny central beliefs of Christianity and Judaism.

There’s a similar phenomenon every winter. As Christmas draws near, it seems we’re always treated to the trendiest (or, as often as not, stalest) “critical” deconstructions of the New Testament’s accounts of the birth of Jesus. Angelic visitations? Virginal conception? Incarnation? Pure myth and superstition, obviously.

So too at this time of year, we can always count on hearing from those who would revise or cast doubt upon the stories (or at least the supernatural elements in the stories) of Moses and the Exodus, and Jesus and the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

It was in keeping with that tradition that PBS aired reruns this month of the 2008 NOVA program “The Bible’s Buried Secrets,” which surveys what archaeology can tell us — and what many archaeologists think archaeology is telling us — about the people, places and events depicted in the Bible.

I don’t mean that this program displays overt hostility toward or bias against Christian or Jewish beliefs. On the contrary, the show presents its survey in a proper, level-headed tone, and it isn’t anything even remotely like the “Chariots of the Gods” or “Nazi Aliens” tomfoolery of which most of the programming on the so-called History Channel seems to consist.

Nevertheless, “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” supports the revisionist and skeptical trends found in much of our modern biblical scholarship. The program correctly explains that archaeological discoveries so far have yielded little if any direct support for or corroboration of the biblical narrative prior to the time of King David. In fact, some archaeological finds appear to contradict the Bible.

Of itself, a lack of archaeological corroboration doesn’t mean the Bible is wrong. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as the old saying goes. I would not expect the Egyptians to erect monuments or inscribe tombs and temples with accounts of how they and their gods were humiliated by the deity worshipped by their Hebrew slaves. After all, that was a culture where pharaohs would scrape names off monuments and temples to try to make people forget that their predecessors had ever existed.

In other cases, it could be that the evidence we seek was destroyed long ago. But even when we have artifacts, it may no longer be possible to determine their meaning and significance with any degree of certainty.

And sometimes the evidence simply has been misinterpreted. “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” rejects the biblical account of Joshua and the conquest of Canaan, pointing to a lack of evidence that the cities of Canaan were sacked around 1200 B.C., the era when it has been thought the Israelites invaded. Hazor was destroyed around that time, but Jericho’s walls “fell down flat” supposedly about 1550 B.C., while Ai is said to have fallen about 2200 B.C.

Instead of the biblical story of Joshua’s invasion, this program at first suggests and then proceeds to assert as fact that the Israelites never invaded Canaan, but were Canaanites who rebelled against the king of Hazor and then merged with a band of Canaanites who had escaped from slavery in Egypt and borrowed tales of the Midianite god “Yhw.”

It’s a nice story, but I have to wonder how Pharaoh Merneptah could have mentioned “Israel” as one of the nations living in Canaan when Israel supposedly had not yet emerged as a Canaanite subculture following the destruction of Hazor. Also, the identification of Ai and the date of Jericho’s fall are both disputed. Sometimes it’s the interpretation of the evidence, and not the evidence itself, that conflicts with the Bible — and when that’s the case, you’re as safe trusting the Bible as you are modern reconstructions.

Skepticism and revisionism are as much a part of our culture’s Easter and Passover seasons as Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments.” But I strongly suspect DeMille’s Hollywood-ized and greatly embellished dramatization of the Exodus has greater historical authenticity than many of the reimaginings proposed by modern skeptics and revisionists.

Jared Olar may be reached at jolar@pekintimes.com.

The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the newspaper.

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